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Claude Grahame-White was born in Bursledon, Hampshire on 21 August 1879, and educated at Bedford Grammar School.[1] He learned to drive in 1895, was apprenticed as an engineer and later started his own motor engineering company.

Grahame-White was one of the first people to qualify as pilot in England, becoming the holder of Royal Aero Club certificate No. 6, awarded in April 1910.[2] He became a celebrity in England in April 1910 when he competed with the French pilot Louis Paulhan for the £10,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail newspaper for the first flight between London and Manchester in under 24 hours. Although Paulhan won the prize, Grahame White's achievement was widely praised.

On 14 October 1910 while in Washington, D.C. Grahame-White flew his Farman biplane over the city and landed on Executive Avenue near the White House. Rather than being arrested Grahame-White was applauded for the feat by the newspapers.[5]

He is known for activities related to the commercialisation of aviation, and he was also involved in promoting the military application of air power before the First World War with a campaign called "Wake Up Britain", also experimenting with fitting various weapons and bombs to aircraft. During the war itself he flew the first night patrol mission against an expected German raid on 5 September 1914.[6]

In 1911 he established a flying school at Hendon Aerodrome. In 1912 Grahame-White gave H.G. Wells his first flight.[7] The Aerodrome was lent to the Admiralty (1916), and eventually taken over by the RAF in 1919. Grahame-White's aerodrome was purchased by the RAF in 1925, after a protracted legal struggle. After this he lost his interest in aviation, eventually moving to Nice in his old age, where he died in 1959 having made a fortune in property development in the UK and US.[1]

Hendon Aerodrome later became RAF Hendon but after flying ceased there in the 1960s it was then largely redeveloped as a housing estate which was named Grahame Park in tribute to Grahame-White. An original World War I Grahame-White aircraft factory hangar was relocated a few years ago to the RAF Museum, where it houses the museum's World War I collection and is named the Grahame White Factory.

In 1911 The Grahame-White Aviation Company was formed to cover his aviation interests, including aerodromes and aircraft design, development, and construction. One of the designers, John Dudley North, became Boulton & Paul's chief designer.

As well as his success in aviation, Claude Grahame-White was a published author whose works include:

The Story of the Aeroplane;The Aeroplane, Past, Present, and Future, 1911;The Aeroplane in War;Aviation, 1912;Learning to Fly, 1914;Aircraft in the Great War, 1915;Air Power, 1917;Our First Airways, their Organisation, Equipment, and Finance, 1918;Books for Boys;Heroes of the Air;With the Airmen;The Air King’s Treasure;The Invisible War-Plane;Heroes of the Flying Corps; Flying, an Epitome and a Forecast, 1930

He also contributed to newspapers, reviews, and magazines, dealing with aeronautics in the military and commercial fields.

^Michael Sherborne, H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (Peter Owen, 2010), p. 216. Wells enthusiastically described the experience in a short piece entitled "My First Flight," later reprinted in An Englishman Looks at the World (1914).